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The Key Ring
by
The tobacco smoke sifts and eddies into the carefully labeled pigeonholes of his desk, and his stenographer wonders whether she dare interrupt him to ask whether that word was “priority” or “minority” in the second paragraph of the memo to Mr. Ebbsmith. He smells that bacon again; he remembers stretching out on the cool sand to watch the dusk seep up from the valley and flood the great clear arch of green-blue sky. He remembers that there were no key rings in his pocket then, no papers, no letters, no engagements to meet Mr. Fonseca at a luncheon of the Rotary Club to discuss demurrage. He remembers the clear sparkle of the Peace water in the sunshine, its downward swell and slant over many a boulder, its milky vexation where it slid among stones. He remembers what he had said to himself then, but had since forgotten, that no matter what wounds and perplexities the world offers, it also offers a cure for each one if we know where to seek it. Suddenly he gets a vision of the whole race of men, campers out on a swinging ball, brothers in the common motherhood of earth. Born out of the same inexplicable soil bred to the same problems of star and wind and sun, what absurdity of civilization is it that has robbed men of this sense of kinship? Why he himself, he feels, could enter a Bedouin tent or an Eskimo snow-hut and find some bond of union with the inmates. The other night, he reflects, he saw moving pictures of some Fiji natives, and could read in their genial grinning faces the same human impulses he knew in himself. What have men done to cheat themselves of the enjoyment of this amazing world? “We’ve been cheated!” he cries, to the stenographer’s horror.
He thinks of his friends, his partners, his employees, of conductors on trains and waiters in lunchrooms and drivers of taxicabs. He thinks, in one amazing flash of realization, of all the men and women he has ever seen or heard of–how each one nourishes secretly some little rebellion, some dream of a wider, freer life, a life less hampered, less mean, less material. He thinks how all men yearn to cross salt water, to scale peaks, to tramp until weary under a hot sun. He hears the Peace, in its far northern valley, brawling among stones, and his heart is very low.
“Mr. Edwards to see you,” says the stenographer.
“I’m sorry, sir,” says Edwards, “but I’ve had the offer of another job and I think I shall accept it. It’s a good thing for a chap to get a chance—-“
My friend slips the key ring back in his pocket.
“What’s this?” he says. “Nonsense! When you’ve got a good job, the thing to do is to keep it. Stick to it, my boy. There’s a great future for you here. Don’t get any of those fool ideas about changing around from one thing to another.”